In response to a 1,000-calorie exercise binge posted on Facebook, my friend Jennifer cracked that she “burned 20 calories going through photos.” Another friend, formerly quite athletic, confided to me privately that he’d put on weight but had been inspired to do something about it by my updates. The responses have varied from heartwarming to hilarious. Other users make their food intake completely public, or use Twitter to announce they’ve completed their daily diaries. I share the details only with other MyFitnessPal users, taking those engineers at their word that they don’t care what I had for breakfast. I post my exercise calories and announce the completion of my daily food diary on Facebook, while limiting Twitter posts to weight-loss milestones. I depended mostly on MyFitnessPal, which has fine-tuned controls for broadcasting updates and sharing food diaries. Other apps and Web sites that can assist you in losing weight or in sticking to an exercise plan with the help of your friends include DailyBurn, Gain Fitness, LoseIt and Social Workout. People with at least 10 friends lost an average of 20.5 pounds. People who added friends on MyFitnessPal, giving them access to their calorie counts, lost 50 percent more weight than the typical user, they say. But Mike and Albert Lee, the developers of MyFitnessPal, the calorie-tracking app I depend upon, say I’m not an isolated case.īy analyzing a sample of 500,000 users’ recorded weights, and tracking that against how many friends they had on the service, the Lees (who are brothers) found that the more friends people had, the more weight they lost. It’s a limited experiment, without a control set. In the year before, when I dieted and exercised in digital isolation, recording my calories in and out in a so-last-century Moleskine notebook, I lost only 20 pounds. Since last March, when I first got an iPhone, downloaded a host of helpful apps and hooked them up to my Twitter and Facebook accounts, I’ve lost 63 pounds. Moreover, they wanted to know whether that added up to my caloric target for the day.Īnd it seems their sustained obsession with my obsession has helped me stay on track. Yet in my experience, a small set of friends turned out to be intensely interested in what I had for breakfast. More than half cited this reason: “I don’t really care what you had for breakfast.” EE Times, a publication for engineers, once asked its readers why they disliked Twitter. ![]() This sort of oversharing drives some people crazy. When I completed my food and exercise diary, the computer informed my Facebook friends when I lost weight, it broadcast the news to the world on Twitter. ![]() When I went to the gym, I also checked in on Foursquare, announcing my location to friends and eventually winning the rank of “mayor” of my local gym. ![]() With so many people anxious to hear the most trivial updates on my life, could I use the friends I added to shed the weight I gained? Eighty-three pounds lighter, I’d say yes.įor 315 days straight, I logged into a Web site or popped out my phone and confessed what I ate, how much I exercised and what I weighed. I made thousands of new friends on Facebook and Twitter, and, thanks to the proximity of my refrigerator, put an additional 35 pounds on an already rotund body. About four years ago, when I started working at home, I plugged into a laptop to write about Silicon Valley.
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